Oath of Swords

them.

“Falderson,” he said quietly to Bahzell in passable Navahkan, “is as stupid as the day is long.” He craned his neck to gaze up at the hradani and shook his head. “In fact, he’s even stupider than I thought. You, sir, are the biggest damned hradani-no offense-I think I’ve ever seen.”

“None taken,” Bahzell rumbled. “And my thanks. I’m thinking it would have gotten a mite messy if you hadn’t happened along.”

“I didn’t ‘happen’ along,” the sergeant said. “The mayor wasn’t very happy about your visit, and he asked us to keep an eye on you. Now-” he waved at the weapons his companion still held “-you can see why, I think.”

“Sergeant,” Brandark began, “I assure you-”

“No need to assure me of anything, Lord Brandark.” The sergeant granted the title without irony, and Brandark cocked an eyebrow. “From all I hear, you’ve been here before and always avoided trouble, and it’s plain as the nose on my face your friend didn’t pick this quarrel.” The sergeant’s mouth quirked. “If he had, I doubt Falderson would have gotten off with no more than broken bones. But the fact is that Waymeet doesn’t like hradani. This is a country town, and it’s not thirty years since the entire place burned to the ground in a border raid. Country folk have long memories, and besides-” He broke off and shrugged, and Bahzell grunted in unhappy understanding.

“That being the case,” the sergeant went on, “I think it would be better all around if you and your friend moved on, Lord Brandark. Meaning no disrespect, and I realize you have road tokens. More than that, I realize neither of you has any intention of making trouble. But the point is, you don’t have to make trouble; you are trouble, and this is my town.”

Bahzell’s ears flattened, but he clamped his jaws on his anger and glanced at Brandark. The Bloody Sword looked back with a small shrug, and Bahzell snorted, then looked back at the sergeant and nodded grimly.

“Thank you.” There was a trace of embarrassment in the man’s voice, but no apology, and he glanced at the sun. “I’d say you’ve another hour of light, Lord Brandark. I’m sure the innkeeper can put up a supper for you-tell him to put it on my tab-but I’d advise you to eat in the saddle.”

He drew himself up to a sort of attention, nodded, and beckoned to his companion. The two guardsmen marched out the inn gate, and Bahzell and Brandark stood alone in the center of the silent, deserted yard.

Chapter Seven

The gate guard gave them a sharp look as they made their way through Drover’s Gate into Esgfalas. Bahzell gazed back with a certain dour bitterness but let it pass. Waymeet lay days behind, and he’d managed to conquer his fury at what had happened there, yet the all-pervasive hostility around him was worse, in its way, than anything he’d been forced to endure in Navahk. At least there he’d known his enemies had cause for their enmity.

The outright hatred had eased as they got further from the border, yet what was left was almost worse. It was a cold, smokelike thing that hovered everywhere yet lacked even the justification of border memories. It sprang not from anything he or Brandark, or even raiders, had done; it sprang from who and what they were .

The gate guard took his time checking their road tokens, and Bahzell folded his arms and leaned against his packhorse. The gelding blew wearily, then turned its head to lip the hradani’s ears affectionately, and Bahzell rubbed its forehead as he studied what he could so far see of Esgfalas.

Esgan was a human realm, and Bahzell knew the shorter-lived, more fertile humans produced denser populations than his own folk found tolerable. But he also knew from his tutors that Esgan was less populous than many other human lands . . . and its capital still seemed terrifyingly vast. The city walls were enormous, if in poorer repair than they should have been, and the traffic passing through the gates beggared anything Bahzell had ever seen. He couldn’t even begin to guess how many people lived within those walls, but at the very least it must be many times the population of the city of Hurgrum, possibly greater than his father’s entire princedom!

His ears twitched as they picked up the whispered comments of the humans making their way past him. Judging by their content, most of the speakers believed he couldn’t hear them, or that he wouldn’t understand if he did, and he chose to pretend they were right. In fact, his Esganian was much better than it had been, for, like most of the human tongues of central and northern Norfressa, it was a variant of Axeman, and Prince Bahnak had insisted all of his sons must speak that fluently. The Empire of the Axe seldom impinged upon the distant lands of the eastern hradani, but its might and influence were so great no ruler could afford not to speak its tongue any more than he could not speak that of the Empire of the Spear, its single true rival, and constant exposure to Esganian had helped him master the differences.

Brandark finished speaking to the guard, and the two of them made their way into the city. As always, people tended to clear their path, pushing rudely back against their neighbors when necessary, and Bahzell smiled sourly as even beggars gave them a wide berth. There were some advantages to being a brutal, murdering hradani after all, it seemed.

The sounds and smells and colors of the city made it hard to maintain his impassivity. The streets shifted with no apparent rhyme or reason from flagstone to cobbles to brick and back again, and not one of them went more than fifty yards before it bent like a serpent. He wondered how much of that was by chance and how much by design. This warren would be a nightmare for any commander, but if a defender knew the streets and an attacker didn’t . . .

Some of the serpentine quality faded as they neared the center of town. The streets grew broader, too, lined with solid structures of brick, stone, and wood and no longer overhung by encroaching upper stories. Taverns and shops stood shoulder-to-shoulder with carpet stalls, cutlers, and street-side grills that gave off delicious smells, but that, too, faded as Brandark turned down a wide avenue. Houses replaced them-enormous houses, by Bahzell’s standards-set in manicured grounds. He knew the smell of wealth when he met it, yet even here, the houses clustered tightly, for there simply wasn’t room for spacious estates in this packed city.

Some of the well-kept homes boasted their own guards, who stood by closed entry gates, often with hands near their weapons as the hradani passed, and Bahzell wondered what he and Brandark were doing here. This was no place to find the sort of employment they sought, and the palpable suspicion of those guards left him feeling like a scout walking knowingly into an ambush, but he could only trust Brandark knew what he was about.

He pulled his attention back from the watching eyes and made himself pay more attention to the city’s quality and less to its sheer size. Vast and crowded Esgfalas might be, but it was infinitely better kept than Navahk. Even the poorer streets were as clean as anything in Hurgrum; these broad, residential avenues actually sparkled under the sun, and the gutters along their sides were deep but clean, obviously for drainage and not simply a convenient place to shove refuse. He hated the feeling of being closed in, denied long sight lines and space, yet there was a safe, solid feel to this place . . . or would have been, if the people who lived here hadn’t hated him.

Brandark made another turn, and Bahzell heaved a mental sigh of relief as they left the palatial avenues behind and the buildings changed quickly back into places of business. A short quarter-hour took them into an area of huge warehouses and shouting work gangs mixed with the grating roar of wagon wheels, and he felt himself relaxing still further. A man had to watch his toes or lose them to those rumbling wheels, perhaps, but there was too much activity and energy here for anyone to waste time staring at him bitterly.

There were more foreigners, as well. He heard at least a dozen languages chattering about him, and his ears pricked in surprise as a slender, gilt-haired man crossed the street ahead of him. He’d never seen an elf, but those delicately pointed ears and angular eyebrows couldn’t belong to a human, and now that he looked, he saw representatives of still other Races of Man.

He watched in fascination as a small cluster of halflings trotted busily down the street. They stood barely waist high to a human, reaching little more than to Bahzell’s thigh, and delicate ivory horns gleamed on their foreheads. They attracted their own share of distrustful looks, and he snorted in understanding. The histories said there’d been no halflings prior to the Wizard Wars. The same wars that had brought the Fall of Kontovar and afflicted his own kind with the Rage had produced the small, horned people of the youngest Race of Man, and that was enough to make them suspect to anyone else. Nor did their reputation help, though Bahzell had